BLANK AUDIO. Acrobat 10 allows you to not only create PDF files with ease, but also combine multiple files into a single PDF as well. The really nice thing about this feature is that the files don't have to be PDF files prior to combining them. As you'll see here, we can select various formats, and combine them into a single PDF file on the fly. I'm going to begin with Acrobat 10 open. And I'm going to come up here to the Create button in my toolbar. And I'm going to choose the Combined Files into a Single PDF option. Now it's going to bring up this Dialog box that allows me to combine the files into either a single PDF or a PDF portfolio.

In this video I'm going to focus on the single PDF option. Now in order to combine the files I need to add them to my list. So at the top of this dialog I'm going to click the Add Files button and choose Add Files from the list. I'm then going to navigate to my Project files folder, into the Combining folder. And as you can see I've got a variety of different files here. And what I'm going to do is I'm going to select one of the Letterhead options. I actually have the DocX format for one of the Letterhead files and the dot DOC format for one of the Letterheads.

Doesn't really matter which one you choose to make things easy I'll select this Letterhead file. And then I'll hold down the Ctrl key on Windows or the Cmd key on Mac, and I'm going to select two other files. The sell sheet, as well as the siding prices file. I'm then going to click the Open button. And you'll notice that all three of these options, I'll just click down here to deselect them. All three of these files have been added to my list. I can change the order of these files by clicking on one of them and clicking the Move Up button or the Move Down button. And one of the interesting things about using an Excel spreadsheet is that when I select this file.

I can even choose which sheet I want to use from that Excel spreadsheet. So if I were to actually click that button, you'll see a quick flash of the Excel spreadsheet opening, and I kinda lost that dialog so I'm going to come down to my Task bar. And I'm going to choose the Combined Files window so that it shows it again. And it would actually allow me to select which sheet of the spreadsheet file I want to use when I'm combining into a single PDF. So there is only one sheet in this file.

So I'm going to leave sheet one selected. And then I'll go ahead and click Okay. You'll also notice that the sell sheet file is giving me a warning. And this PDF file is a PDFX format. So it's specifically giving me a warning that the file will no longer retain those properties once combined. And that's fine in this case cause I'm really just using this to distribute to a client. Now what I'm going to do, I'm going to click on the Letterhead file and I'm going to move that down. That way they're going to see my cell sheet and the siding prices and then the letter at the bottom.

If I'd like, I could click on the Letterhead file and click the Move Up button to keep it as the first page. You can order these files any way you wish. Now down here in the lower right corner I can also specify the file size that this final PDF will use. So the first option is the smaller file size, as you can see, suitable for onscreen display, email and the Internet. The second button is the default file size suitable for reliably viewing and printing business documents. And the third button is the larger file size, suitable for quality printing on desktop printers.

So in my case I'm going to keep the second button selected. And if I click the options button I can also add some additional features to this PDF file, such as enabling accessibility in the PDS file. Which means it'll add accessibility for people who have visual impairments. I can also tell it to add bookmarks to the PDF, and some other options below as well. So I'm going to keep these set to their default.

I'll click Okay. And then I'll click the Combine Files button. And Acrobat 10 is going to do a lot of the work for me. So, as you can see, it's combining the Letterhead file first. Then it's moving on to the sell sheet. And then finally, the Siding file, which is an Excel spreadsheet. And when it's all finished you'll notice that I'm left with a single PDF file. I'm going to go ahead and fit this page to the window by pressing Ctrl+0 on Windows or Cmd+0 on Mac.

And if I page through this document, you'll see that the second page is the sell sheet which was originally a PDF. And the third page is the siding prices, which was actually originally an Excel spreadsheet. As you can see, you don't actually have to do much work up front to use this feature. Simply select the files that you want to use, and then combine them into a single PDF file that you can easily distribute to a client.

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Released

5/23/2011

Over the last decade the PDF has become increasingly popular in the business world as a means of sharing information, becoming so ubiquitous that often people find themselves using PDFs without really understanding what they are and how they work. In this workshop, author and trainer Chad Chelius explains the benefits of using the PDF file format, how to control the size of your PDFs, how to collaborate with other users on a PDF document, how to share and distribute PDF files in a variety of ways, and much more. The lessons focus on business use and the Microsoft Office applications as well as on the new features available in Acrobat X, but much of the material also applies to previous versions of Acrobat.